


Vainglory And The Lionhearted

by Sharketah (orphan_account)



Category: Log Horizon
Genre: Akawaiitsuki, Angst, F/F, F/M, Family of Choice, How To Maintain Relationships Like A Grown Ass Man, M/M, Manipulation, Morbid humour, Pacific Rim AU, Platonic Love, Vodka Politics, drunk science
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-21
Updated: 2015-11-23
Packaged: 2018-05-02 18:23:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5258936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/Sharketah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He has a terrible habit of inviting tragedies like theirs right into his lap. Tragedies that seem to get attached awfully quickly. Tragedies that don't know when to leave.</p>
<p>Tragedies on the faces of tearful young girls, and smirking veterans, and prying technicians who can't keep their charming psychoanalysis to themselves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I fully intend for all the events in the PRU that I use to be pre-movie - maybe you're looking for a crossover that isn't just a copy paste from the big screen story, hm?

Kanami's hand is frigid against the skin of his chest, fingers hopelessly tangled in the chains of his cross. Ever since they switched he's taken to leaving her tags at the bottom of his bag, or on the kitchen counter, or strewn about the workbenches down in engineering. Tempting fate, maybe. Or chaos theory. She never takes his off.

Light but firm, her pulse tickles Shiroe's nose where he's pressed up against her throat. Occasionally he'll feel it elsewhere, miles away, dancing across his own skin like it's trying to reach his veins as hers stutter and fail. Like they might be able to share a beating heart between them. Maybe they could. Maybe, if it weren't for the ice seeping out of her fingertips and infecting his body like the cancer is infecting hers - choking out their systems one by one like an epidemic slowly throttling a city, district by district. Each blood vessel is a single human being that talks and drinks and breathes and fucks and contaminates.

Thankfully, there's no alarmist beeping to fracture the silence. She's not on life support. Kanami's not completely done yet. This isn't a movie set. There's an IV, and breathing tubes, and though he's not entirely sure what's happening under her skin he figures it must be morphine. They'd told him she'd had a particularly bad time of it today, but he hadn't needed to hear it. As long as it's been (four years, two months, however many days it takes to fill up the chemotherapy wing) they're still strong. Pain is a potent emotion. It's not difficult to pretend it's his own spinal cord looping back those nerve impulses and setting his abdomen on fire. Shiroe does, most of the time.

Sadly, he doesn't also seem to be reaping any of the benefits those drugs are supposed to be providing her. He's not sleeping. He hopes that it isn't echoing.

This time Shiroe's brought her tags with him - wrapped around the hand buried in her surprisingly comfortable hospital pillow. Kanami had flung them at him sometime in their third trimester, exultant and high off their first dual sim session. With a wink she'd taken his own from right around his neck, laughing and grinning and intoning something about not dying alone, and after that he'd gotten rather drunk and she'd missed out on some celebratory cadet party to stay and pet his hair until he'd fallen asleep.

Maybe he should try that again. Except that Kanami won't be there and it probably won't work because Shiroe really is going to die alone. He'll be old and blind and relatively heartless, and it'll be a beautiful sob-story that nobody will ever read about because where they've come from?

The only people who remember jeager pilots are other jeager pilots.

Shiroe breathes shallowly into the junction of her shoulder and neck, lungs somewhat unwilling with the pseudo-uncomfortable way he's draped over the side of the hospital bed, just a little too short to have enough room to inhale properly. It's almost like the sensation they used to share submerging for the first time. Constrictive. Kanami had never enjoyed claustrophobic situations like that, and soothing her always took priority over admitting that he wasn't entirely fond of them either. That was their dynamic. Kanami was the one who liked to punch things. Shiroe told her which bones to break.

How long he's been sitting there, he can't be certain. A few hours. The nurses are always cooing over his devotion. They assume he comes here for something he just can't bear to live without, something with which to soothe his bleeding heart and cry his tenuously held-back tears over. It's not really true, is it? But it's not a lie either. Shiroe might've scoffed, or dismissed it, but he probably could. Cry for her, that is. They say that he's too distant, or that she's too external. That they blend about as well and oil and water and that it's sweet and naive and as short-lived as the beast they once used to force themselves together.

Four years, five years. Kanami's always wanted a child. Shiroe's never wanted to stop running.

Shiroe also wants to feel whole, to assuage that prickling emptiness that crawls through his ribcage like he's had an organ removed. Kanami just doesn't want to be alone. 'You got us into this mess, Shiro! We're together for life - you and me. We don't need anyone else!' He supposes it works. 'Symbiotic' is the kind of word they plaster on the cover of those drift psychology textbooks, and it'll probably be an apt descriptor until the day Kanami dies. They need each other. Have done from the moment they first stepped into the kwoon. Since they boarded that plane. Since they were born, since fate decided it wanted to make something of two piles of chromosomes swimming about in the cells of some long-dead prehistoric creatures. __

Or maybe he'll die first. Kanami's never been one to break herself, her purest self, even for her loved ones. Shiroe worries that for him, she might make an exception.

Dim lights and cold walls, the veteran hospital swallows it's sadnesses in silence.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shiroe sulks in a hotel room. Yamato is belligerent.

"Um... Naotsugu told me - it's, ah, Akatsuki, by the way - he told me to ask if you wanted to come and visit us in Susukino. We just got transferred - we'll be there for a month, I think? He, er... also says to say hi to Kanami for him. Me too! I mean, I'd like it if you said hello for me, too. Bye, Shiro."

Shiroe is at his weakest when the sun is rising. Dawn has always been the axe that felled the tree of sensibility, and anyone who'd ever been close enough to catch him in the early morning knew that now was the time to strike. Soundlessly, he buries his face into the pillow and pretends that the world isn't turning, the sun isn't burning, and all light is an illusion given life by the Schrödinger eyes of the human condition.

"Don't make me come and find you, Shiro. Stay put or go back to Shibuya. Corwen still remembers your ass. Try doing a better job of getting lost, yeah? Isaac."

Hindsight is... not usually a voice in his repertoire. It's fickle and like the occasional crushing, uber-nihilistic lapses into depression he skirts around as though they're a series of procrastinatory hot-springs trying to impede his path via means of passive aggressive seduction, Shiroe tends to ignore it. It's a mindful ignorance, of course. Or it would have been if he cared about philosophy even infinitesimally more than he cared about, for instance, the geography of the Ezzo region's infamous slate mountains - equalling approximately one, lonely fuck given atop a colossal pile of nothingness.

"Shiro-kun! Sou told me you were in Ezzo - you should come by! I know you don't like the dome much, but everyone will be really happy to see you. We could always catch up outside of the city. Call me back, and call Henrietta! I think she misses you."

Maybe he shouldn't have gone east. No - Kanami had gone west, and he felt like it was important to be making space. This was a transitional period, for the both of them, and getting clingy now could roadblock the whole purpose of her move. Transfer. From one cage to another really, but this time there would only be one mockingbird on the wire. Shiroe was gone now, right? Free? And that meant that Kanami was free too, in one dimension of the concept, because she was free from him and free from that smothering duality that always made it feel like the walls were closing in, threatening to crush the gilded bars around them as the layers that had been built twisted and collapsed under the weight of-

-nothing. Shiroe's own suffocating cynicism? Who knew how much toxicity the two of them had been parroting back to each other in all that time. How much distress and apprehension and boredom they'd unwitting, unwillingly, been exchanging through a bond that some days felt so palpable in their confinement that it was like they were three-hundred feet off the ground again. 

"Hey Shiro, Kanami here! How's your trip going? It's a shame that we didn't get to travel to Nakasu together, but I guess I'll just have to have fun here for the both of us! You enjoy yourself too, okay? I'll know if you don't! I can read minds! Don't be gone too long, Shiro. See ya!"

He's thinking too hard about this. Chasing belated fears that will eventually dwindle down as his mileage stacks up. Maybe it's the hour. It's definitely the hour. Shiroe kind of misses people. Then his thoughts turn to how so many of them managed to figure out he'd left left Shibuya so quickly, and decides he couldn't care less about human beings - and Kanami obviously must have figured out what Shiroe's been thinking because he can imagine the syrup-slow wave of teasing disapproval hitting his side of the subconsciousness already.

Rolling over again, Shiroe makes a pass at his phone. He counts it as a success that the device actually stays on the bed in the wake of his appalling miss and decides not to try again. Speaking of mileage, Shiroe's beginning to grow suspicious of his reasons for stopping at this tiny mountainside inn in the first place. Questioning his lucid self's motives... motives that may have included running out of gas in the middle of the night and finding himself marooned miles from the nearest town, kilometres from the local city and a few dozen continents from any desire to go prospecting in a snowstorm.

Shiroe should have taken this little road trip in a jeager. Jeagers didn't run on gas. But cars didn't run on apathy, so who was he to be making statements? He obviously couldn't be trusted on the subject.

As the light strengthens, his thoughts begin to grudging turn to what, exactly, he was going to do now that he was out here - their sincerity following a curve running more or less parallel to the inefficiency of the curtains. Naotsugu and Akatsuki must have been doing well if she was passing on calls for him. They'd probably be... happy, if he wanted to stay with them. Shiroe considers taking up their offer. 

It's Naotsugu, and Shiroe loves Naotsugu with all his heart. Truly. They're probably on shore leave, which comes with a lot of free daylight. Shiroe hasn't really gotten to spend time with them in two years. Well, he's never really spent that much time with Akatsuki anyway, but she's always been friendly. In a distant, poised sort of way. It could be an excuse to bond with her - after all, it's mostly Shiroe's fault for not keeping up with Naotsugu and his team, and if he'd stayed in the shatterdome they might have actually had an opportunity to get to know each other-

That's a looping monologue that needs to end. Shiroe sighs. 

As much goodwill as there is there, and as much affection, they can't escape the fact that they're still probably living on-base. Especially out here, away from home. Shiroe can't regret his - maybe a little cowardly - eastern escapade, but he can sure blame himself for the painful lack of forward planning. Who flees across the channel without somewhere to run to? Who manages to make fleeing so conspicuous? It's probably not as bad as he thinks it is, but... what will he do if Corwen actually does come knocking? Shiroe doubts he's in any position to decline whatever offer the man might pose and, infuriatingly, both of them know it.

Or perhaps his freedom will subsist on honour and a mutual respect for the privacy of all participating parties. After all, he's been forcibly retired from the defence corps. He's compromised. He's of no use in an environment like that anymore.

He's twenty five fucking years old. 

Through the walls, Shiroe can hear someone's radio buzzing quietly, amenable to the isolated, early-morning atmosphere. He wonders why they're out here. Why anyone would be out here. (Why he's out here, but doesn't worry about that one for too long. It's a dead conversation). Some personality with a smoothness to her vowels connoting the local Ezzon wildernesses is speaking - about the news? Offering a rather dulcet overview of the jarringly atrocious island weather. There's a lot of snow. And sleet. And hail. Shiroe should go out and find some winter gear. Shiroe should also go out and find a reason to put on clothes and get out of bed and come slinking back down the mountain like a recalcitrant coyote caught by an electric fence.

...Shiroe should also go out and get a sense of humour. Ditch the wry skepticism. Maybe find a therapist or two - they're definitely owed him. 

For land and for honour, for justice, and for the safety, sanity, and consent of all involved. Amen. Enlist in the Pan-Yamato Defense Corps today - we provide free counselling. Ugh. Fuck Krusty, and fuck his corps. Fuck his robots. Fuck his shady political motives made marginally less shady by Shiroe's ability to see through the smokescreen but infinitely more discomfiting, and fuck his intimidating little secret police force of loyalists that were actually rather... enamoured, with him, and... fuck that too because Shiroe is an engineer, dammit, not the DC's therapy dog. He doesn't do the 'front line'.

Until he does. Until Kanami does, because Kanami belongs on the front line. Kanami is the font line. Even Shiroe isn't bold enough to think standing up to a force of nature is going to get him anywhere - is going to work. He's gutsy, not stupid. For all the good it does him in a kennel like that. 

Shiroe feels like he's still not entirely lucid. Introspecting in such a state is... the opposite of a good idea. It's a vodka idea. A Kanami idea, when Kanami is laughing but one of the big six has just been killed and it's all over the news like a tsunami or a hurricane and this huge, universal bubble has just been popped - this golden age ripped out of their hands because we. are. making. war. and you're legal, right? Shiroe? Because I'll trade you this bottle of citron if you can make us another line of jeagers - free of interest. Sorry. That was a bad joke. Don't tell that Eastal guy, he's busy being a dictator. He likes you. Shit, I like you. I like Kanami. I don't want any more of you dying like... like that. Like them.

Please? Hey - I'll join the academy. The one they're opening? I'll find a partner. I'll pilot a jeager. I'll fight - I can fight. Let me fight. 

Fuck Krusty and all of his heroes.

Shiroe wishes he had someone to snap him out of this... lull. He doesn't feel so much like a functioning human being anymore. Not since he left that hospital, and if he's really honest? Not since he left the corps. It's pathetic. It's disgusting. What's Shiroe doing out here if he can't even take care of himself like the grown adult that he is? He doesn't deserve this shitty simulacrum of escapism, but nor does he feel like he deserves the safety net of an organisation. Of coworkers. Of family? They don't deserve him, either. Inversely. They shouldn't have to look after him. He shouldn't have to be looked after.

All of this self-pity. Shiroe should go on a show. One of those ones where they talk about people like him, analyse people like him - but not him, because that would be politically incorrect. Nobody wants to know about soldiers. They want to know about pilots - as if you can distil an entity into two parodies of the real thing. One fit for human consumption and one... not so much. He doubts it would achieve anything. Not for him, at least.

Maybe he should go and find Naotsugu and Akatsuki. Maybe he should go and ask if that patron next door, the one with the radio, has anything better at their bedside to share than bottom-shelf bourbon. Maybe he should just give up and go back to Shibuya - or, Nakasu, now. Back to wherever Kanami is. Back to their sidewalk, busking apathy for both sympathy and isolation, and a little derision, too, because moderation, right?

Shiroe wants to go and take a shower. Shiroe wants to stop dragging himself through a proverbial gutter he shouldn't have to. Wants a few things, approximately the same amount of things as he has unanswered voicemail, and thinks that maybe if he listens to all of those messages he'll desire less. He settles on a compromise, and rolls out of the modest hotel bed with his phone in hand. The world feels a little starker standing on two feet. 

Shiroe places his phone in the sink, ignores the mirror, and tries vainly to construct a counter-argument that might actually keep him in this quaint little mountain range until the kaiju go away, or the world ends, or some newtype journey-child prodigy comes after him like they're going to inherit the secret of mono-kinetic jeager piloting if they can make it to his Lovecraftian lair. Shiroe smirks wryly at a reflection he's pretending doesn't exist.

If Corwen wants something, he can come and get it himself. He's in a good mood to appreciate the cheap satisfaction. He's going to need it.

**Author's Note:**

> I should make sure to point out that this won't be Shinami, or Kanoe, or whatever you feel like calling it. (Probably neither of those because I made them both up on the spot. Canoe-shipping, anyone?) Theirs is a relationship doomed to be forever platonic. In all the wonderful ways a platonic pilot relationship manifests itself as, of course.


End file.
